Death And Resurrection In North Korea (Updated)

Unconfirmed reports claim the ex-girlfriend of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was executed by firing squad along with 11 others, after the group allegedly made and sold a sex tape.

Hyon Song Wol, a singer in North Korea’s famed Unhasu Orchestra, was killed by machine gun along with 11 other members of the orchestra and the Wangjaesan Light Music Band, another popular state-run music group in North Korea, according to a report in The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest daily newspaper.

The report, which cites an anonymous source in China, says the group was arrested Aug. 17 for filming and selling a pornographic video featuring themselves.

A top general in North Korea was executed this month on corruption charges, around the time the nation’s leader, Kim Jong-un, warned the party and military elites against abuse of power and other misdeeds, a South Korean official said Wednesday.

The general, Ri Yong-gil, chief of the North Korean Army’s general staff and ranked third in its hierarchy, was executed on charges of “factionalism, abuse of power and corruption” in the latest episode of Mr. Kim’s “reign of terror,” the official said.

A top North Korean military general reported to have been executed three months ago is actually very much alive and has now been appointed to two senior-level positions within the nation’s ruling Workers’ Party.

North Korea has executed its special envoy to the United States on spying charges, as its leader, Kim Jong-un, has engineered a sweeping purge of the country’s top nuclear negotiators after the breakdown of his second summit meeting with President Trump, a major South Korean daily reported on Friday.

Kim Hyok-chol, the envoy, was executed by firing squad in March at the Mirim airfield in a suburb of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest daily, reported on Friday, citing an anonymous source. Mr. Kim faced the charge that he was “won over by the American imperialists to betray the supreme leader,” the newspaper said.

We are now awaiting news of Kim Hyok-chol's promotion to an important Workers Party position.

Update June 3 2019

As expected it turned out that Kim Hyok-chol is alive and well. He is also holding on to important party positions.

SEOUL, June 3 (Yonhap) -- A top aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched an art troupe's performance together with the leader, Pyongyang's state media reported Monday, belying rumors that he was purged for the leader's embarrassing no-deal summit with U.S. President Donald Trump. Kim Yong-chol, who served as Pyongyang's chief interlocutor and counterpart of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, attended Sunday's performance by amateur art groups made up of the wives of military officers, together with leader Kim and other top officials, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said. ...In the Supreme People's Assembly in mid-April, he was also appointed as a member of the State Affairs Commission, the communist state's most powerful administrative apparatus, of which Kim Jong-un was re-elected as chairman.

You know, it seems a lesser understood burr under the saddle of the West in their dealings with northern Korea is that they have zero actual intelligence from the entire nation. Nothing from hacking, from electronic surveillance, and certainly not from live assets on the ground. Even turncoats are virtually non-existent. No wonder they hate Kim so, and continue to so badly misunderstand and miscalculate in their dealings with Kim!

Next they'll be claiming Kim Jung-un is the Night King who leads an army of wights.

As for the Guardian's claim that the "Trump summit" was a failure, I disagree as it was an essential part of the process whereby Americans particularly the Washington Borg come to understand that the Korean War after the US forces reached the 38th parallel and the continuing American occupation of South Korea were all for nothing.

Well there's the football results! They're usually pretty accurate. Besides, once in a while there is an editorial oversight and they print something truthful by mistake. It's always fun to catch them out on the odd occasion when they do that. However, I reckon on the North Korea desk they employ a bloke wearing a brightly coloured curly wig and a bow tie that spins round and lights up. Approach him too closely and you will get a custard pie in your face!

A long process wherein the mind is dumbed down to accept everything the CIA says .... just as planned. 'We will not have done our job until the only thing they believe is what we tell them'. Objective achieved!

What did he say to deserve this? Did he insist on following the Kim-Trump Singapore agreement? Did he refuse an interview with the Huffington Post? Or was it because the Embassy raid went awry? In future all US journalists publishing such fantasies should be sent to North Korea for 10 years forced labour.

Everyone is aware of what consuming American fast food bacon triple lard burgers does to a person's body, right? A lifetime of that leads to crippling obesity. A lifetime of consuming corporate mass McMedia infotainment products will do the same thing to a person's mind. Sadly, few Americans can tell the difference between cripplingly bloated heads full of loud and delusional nonsense narratives and disciplined minds employing carefully cultivated reason. In America all opinions are equal, so if they want to believe that Kim Jong Un personally machine-gunned his girlfriend then that's their right as Americans!

Notice that the source is the same: Chosun Ilbo, which, in its turn, uses "[Chinese] anonymous source(s)".

Also notice that, usually, this anonymous source is either pure anonymous or from China. This has a concrete reason: North Korean refugees are within immediate reach to South Koreans, and could readily jeopardize the South Korean newspaper's version.

But even the North Korean refugees are always "prepared" by the South Korean intelligence service before they enter in South Korean society either way, so their versions are always over the top.

We know all the stories by "witnesses" about North Korea are false out of the bat for the simple reason they are too good to be true:

Picture entire villages starving to death, with little girls' corpses on the street, full of flies in their butts and mouths -- all the while, at the same time, the refugee, who was from said village, went to school (for free) in the morning.

Picture those same schools teching little North Korean kids how the West is extremly poor, with people starving to death -- all the while they are traficking and consuming K-pop en masse through pendrives (a penalty, they say would be "punished with death" if they got caught); all the while the country is literally opening up to Chinese imports and building literal shops and markets full with Chinese products.

Picture North Korea -- a country where, as mentioned before, is starving to death -- wasting a machine gun to execute a woman who traficked porn. This stor

Picture Kim Jong-un -- this propaganda genius -- eating lobster and drinking French wine (the source for this, by the way, is the same Chosun Ilbo) in his train while travelling to China, while his country is, once again I repeat this, literally starves to death.

And now we have this story, told like being from an eyewitness ("was executed by firing squad in March at the Mirim airfield in a suburb of Pyongyang"; "“won over by the American imperialists to betray the supreme leader,”").

OT..
Hey b! I've just noticed you've magnified the text in the Allowed HTML Tags instructions, making it simple to copy & paste the HREF instructions, on their own, to use as a template.
In the past, I could only copy all of the instructions making it necessary to delete the ones I didn't want. Big improvement.

News outlets with their "breaking news" exist as commercial enterprises dependent upon a business model that requires wide dissemination to maximize advertising revenue, therefore leading to unreliable sensationalism.
No journalist can go wrong criticizing a US enemy using anonymous sources, and his work is certain to be published, whereas that "journalist" could be called to account for any favorable news on North Korea, Iran, China or Russia.
The final step is the headline-writing, which is done by a higher-up to reflect the latest USG talking points and exact wording (e.g. "rising Iran tensions") even though the body of the article might differ.
One authoritative guide to the journalistic malfeasance which brings us continual war is Norman Solomon's "War Made Easy -- How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Reporters must be loyal government stenographers or they aren't reporters any longer.

The porno and Nuke Negotiator fairy tales are typical puerile Yankee Holier-than-thou claptrap. The Guardian's NK spin reminded me that the BBC has a North Korea (bullshit) specialist called Rupert Wingfield-Jones. He's the star of a couple of childish BBC Mockumentaries about NK. In one he's blathering about how 'backward' NK is against a backdrop of modern tall buildings & street-scapes as far as the eye can see...
VICE News has a couple of good NK docos. North Koreans are mad about basketball and VICE took some US Basketball stars over to NK for a Friendly match.
There's also an amusing 2014 NK doco from Oz called Aim High In Creation. A group of Oz anti-fracking activists go to NK to get some tips from NK film makers on putting together an effective anti-fracking propaganda film. It's 90+ minutes and a bit long-winded but taps right into the NK sense of humour and spirit of National Identity and unity.

I've noticed that these lies about N. Korea always come from S. Korean sources and fit our villain narrative. My favorite one, in a bad way, was the plutonium reactor in Syria where 30 or so N. Koreans were killed in an Israeli air strike. Don't know if I am conflating bomb strikes or not but we had Syria, N. Koreans, Iranians as the villains and Israelis as the heroes. While the S. Koreans told us about the Axis of Evil alliance.

These stories are just too perfect and S. Korea is one of our vassal states, just can't help but wonder if they take instructions from our Information Warriors.

Chosun Ilbo Co is the owner of of Chosun Ilbo, but I can find no information on who owns or controls the company. According to wikipedia, Kim Chang-Kyoon is editor, and again no information available on this person. The paper kicked off again very shortly after WWII so likely it has been controlled by the US ever since.

Just because the imperial powers are hostile to North Korea does not automatically make the latter a saint. It is a horrible government, and none of you would last one week living in that hell hole. Yes the problems of the country are largely a result of American sanctions and aggression against it, but the government is also to blame. The fact many on this blog jump to the defence of dictators simply because they are the targets of American or European interests only serves to undermine the integrity and credibility of real left wing movements. A dictatorship ran in the name of communism! How disheartening. These regimes have truly tainted the good name of socialism.

@ Ninel 27 many on this blog jump to the defence of dictators
Apparently your definition of "dictator" differs from that of many on this blog. Like does it include a country with a do-nothing congress which allows widespread executive privilege?

Recently I came across a copy of the summary conclusions of the Korea International War Crimes Tribunal, dated June 23, 2001, New York, signed by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. It can be accessed">http://iacenter.org/Koreafiles/ktc_indictment.htm”>accessed here. (Here’s an

The beeb comes through.
BBC News--
" . .there is a reason we treat reports about North Korean officials being executed with extreme caution. The claims are incredibly difficult to verify and they are very often wrong". . .here

Ninel @27 sez "...none of you would last one week living in that hell hole."

I don't know about that. I lasted a bit more than a week... a couple months to be exact, which was when my visa expired. The place didn't quite seem so much like a "hell hole" either, but maybe that is because I had been to Baltimore before? In any case, maybe I am just somewhat more stoic than others who are turned off by North Korea, but I thought it was really pleasant.

@15 Don Bacon Not sure if I had heard that one about the 120 dogs before. One of my favorite lurid Kim-is-a-monster stories up until now has been the guy, a general or something, I forget, but they tied him to a post and fired a missile at him. This story came out about the time that civilized nations had cut off exports to the USA of supplies of chemicals used in lethal-injection executions. The state of Oklahoma responded by continuing those executions anyway, using whatever then-governor Mary Fallin could find rummaging around in the under-lavatory cabinet in the downstairs powder room in the governor's mansion. Other capital-punishment, lethal-injection states continued similarly, with some gruesome results. I thought even if the NK story were true, at least it was a fast way to go.

It actually is really sad and pathetic that the US has become so awful with our mass-murdering, torturing, omnicidal ways that we have to use NK as a counter-example like this, irrespective of the truth or falsity of the stories. These stories tend to come out when some particularly outrageous act of our elites has been revealed. "But see? We're STILL better than North Korea!"

@27 Ninel Kind of a tired argument. None of these comments indicates that the commenter thinks Kim is a "saint" or that NK is some kind of utopia.

Perception management by western media is jumping the shark. Ha ha ha. Never seen such pathetic desperation. "If all this should have a reason we would be the last to know". Give 'em hell Kim Jong Un. Whatever you are doing keep it up! British and Vatican slave masters got their panties all in a bunch.

Are you sure you want to try to offload some of the blame on South Korea? They are victims of the American Empire too. I know there is a great deal of resistance to calling it what it is, but South Korea is most definitely occupied by the United States. It is under military occupation and for most of the time since 1945 the US has had "minders" in all of the newsrooms and studios of the country making sure that the what went into textbooks and out over the airwaves was sanitized so as to portray Americans as the exceptional comic book superheroes that they believe themselves to be.

Furthermore, fascists are a small minority of the Korean population, but US backing empowers them and makes them seem like a much bigger force than they actually are. Even a piss-ant gang seems tough and intimidating when they have the backing of the world's biggest military, particularly when that military is perfectly willing to erase humans by the hundreds of thousands with napalm and atomic weapons and has repeatedly demonstrated that willingness.

No, if Uncle Slaughter wasn't breathing down their necks with his rancid and cancerous exhalations the South Koreans would exhibit a radically different attitude towards the North.

american and british intelligence agencies, which I am sure feed all these stories to their outlets, are sure doing a piss poor job..... of intelligently and accurately evaluating what is happening there in the North

Yes, journalists have the right to protect their sources. In fact, this would happen with or without society's consent, because this inability would make the profession inviable.

However, it is custom of Western journalism to give the reader at least the locus of the source, e.g. "an anonymous source from the XXXX Department of the YYY Government", or "a source from within XXXX, who agreed to talk on the condition of hiding its name", or something like that.

Or, alternatively, if you're already a famous journalist who is widely known to cover one specific country or institution, you can simply state "my sources..." when the article is about your field of expertise.

And even those serious, investigative journalist avoid to always use anonymous sources in order not to make the readers begin to dispute his/her work. Always using anonymous sources is only acceptable when: 1) the subject is very sensitive and important (which North Korea indeed is) and 2) the stories always turn out to be true in the due time (capacity of foresight). Those Chosun Ilbo articles satisfy (1), but not (2), therefore, either its source is not trustable or it is fake.

South Korean officials and analysts cautioned that it was too early to say with precision what was happening inside Kim Jong-un’s opaque regime. South Korean news media offered differing conjectures, including whether Kim Hyok-chol, the North’s special nuclear envoy to the United States, had been executed by firing squad in March, as the Chosun Ilbo reported, or was still under interrogation.

But they all agree on one thing: Kim Yong-chol and his negotiating team, which had driven Kim Jong-un’s diplomatic outreach toward Washington, have been sidelined, as the North Korean leader sought a scapegoat to blame for his disastrous second summit meeting with Mr. Trump, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February.

I've seen some documentaries made by people who visited North Korea and moreover filmed their activities and travels in Pyongyang and outside the capital, even though they'd been told not to film.

Two Australians Aleksa Vulovic and Alex Apollonov made a short documentary "The Haircut" about their experience looking for a barber or hair-cutting salon that would cut Vulovic's hair in a style he chose for himself. The duo had come across news, repeated over and over, in Western MSM that NK men were restricted to 28 hairstyles mandated by the government. The film follows Vulovic into a salon, he shows the picture of what he wants to the hairdresser and asks her if she will cut his hair in that style (not one of the 28 "approved" styles, needless to say). She looks at the picture and without batting an eyelid goes to work on Vulovic straight away. Even gives him a twirly moustache.

The documentary may still be available on Youtube. It caused quite a stir on an Australian morning talkshow. One of the hosts, Kerry-anne Kennerley, caused a stir herself by constantly confusing North Korea with Vietnam.

Michael Palin also made a travel film of his 2-week trip in North Korea last year: he spent a week in Pyongyang and travelled to the DMZ, Wonsan and places in-between the following week. The sad part of the film was he just couldn't get the idea of North Korea as a police state out of his head the whole time he was travelling and this coloured everything he saw and experienced.

You might enjoy Andre Vltchek’s film The Faces of North Korea also here.
“ Here it is – my short film about North Korea. No need to drag it, to prolong it – let’s just watch it all together”

As to Michael Palin’s film, I did like the bit where he was dining, drinking, and dancing with the (N) Korean people on their holiday.

For any who still read (books):
This Monstrous War by Wilfred G. Burchett
Plain Perfidy by Allan Winnington & Wilfred Burchett
Koje Unscreened by Wilfred Burchett & Allan Winnington

And this: The Untold Story -'The Korean Empire' about the Emperor / King Gojong and the end of the Chosun Dynasty. A (S) Korean documentary. Perfidy here as well! The US sold Korea out for a “relationship” with the Japanese, how’d that work out…

Still waiting for news from the Guardian that JFK and MLK have been promoted. I expect to see a Guardian report that Seth Rich has been promoted to secretary of state replacing Bolt-on after his recent execution by machete on the White House lawn.

North Korea has labeled former Vice President Joe Biden "an imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being" and a "fool of low IQ," after the U.S. presidential hopeful called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a tyrant.

Deep-fake technology is becoming so simple that anyone can make one.
‏
Deep-fake videos use machine-learning algorithms that take existing images and footage to doctor videos. Some experts worry that deep fakes could heighten disinformation and spark violence, war, or genocide.

Deep fake, a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake", is an artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis technique. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos.

Left, right, center all pile on with pompous articles examining the bullshit story as if these rumored events really happened. The picture is painted in the minds of the masses; everyone sucks this shit up and believes it in their appeal to authority.

It is depressingly amusing. Any hopes of peaceful reunification are over.

All these methods of executing people that Kim Jong-un supposedly employs, as detailed with relish by Fox News, read very much as though the people who originally reported them (supposedly North Korean defectors) were projecting their own sadistic impulses onto Kim - or other people's sadistic impulses onto him.

If we consider that North Korean defectors are briefed by South Korean intelligence agents before the defectors face the media, the possibility arises that the SK intel agents are feeding their own deranged fantasies to the defectors. The defectors comply with the instructions fed to them because they are frightened and have been threatened with return to NK (and the consequences of their treachery) if they don't obey.

Using flamethrowers, mortars and anti-aircraft guns to pulverise people into pieces? Carrying out public executions in fish markets and schoolyards? Feeding babies to guard dogs? These are the kinds of raving fantasies harboured by closet sociopaths looking for scapegoats to dump their fantasies on.

Just what sort of crazies would have the idea of using anti-aircraft guns (or, in previous centuries, cannons) to blast people into smithereens?

Yes, the primary thing I take from these bizarre narratives is what a fucked
up bunch of people the writers are, such massive projection of their own fears
and hatreds outward, such clear fixation on primitive monkey politics (sex, power,
humiliation and domination, and class issues, social status), the British spooks
seem particularly fond of bodily functions and highly dramatic acting out.

And they never apply it to people like bin Salman who really are that stupid and
fucked up in the head, instead they apply it to people who have their shit together.

Anyway, whenever I see one of these stories I always assume it is coming from that
part of the propaganda matrix, the Anglo-sphere, other peoples don't have those
hangups that way.

A few weeks ago, I came across the Chosun Ilbo while looking for news sites to read to study Korean. I didn't read very much (and I don't know the language very well), but it came across as a Korean version of Fox News. I

By the way, I believe that this is the article that the New York Times referenced: Link

You may not be surprised to know that the article's main source of information is an unnamed "North Korean source".

The defence of dictators simply because they are the targets of American or European interests only serves to undermine the integrity and credibility of real left wing movements. A dictatorship ran in the name of communism! How disheartening. These regimes have truly tainted the good name of socialism. Posted by: Ninel | May 31, 2019 1:03:00 PM | 28

I d/n think defense of dictator is the issue ( i don't even like the non dictators. To be a leader of one of the nation states requires to be a subhuman, deranged person in the first place, it d/n matter democratic, autocratic, socialist, communist, whatever, they are all the same <= their trucks are painted differently but they all ride the same road, have the same drivers license, and do the same things).. Ridicule might explain the laughter and seeming defense of dictators. But in reality its probably the magnitude of and shallow depths of lighthearted research tightly coupled to infantile lines of thought invented by interconnected massive in size projects funded by the intelligence agencies that end up playing on private media in public places of the type exposed in the comments here that are the source of the "defense of dictators".

More amazing is that "such manufactured propaganda" is distributed by the wealthy, privately owned USA, British, French, and Israel corporate media organizations with a straight face. <=if it were not for the corporate tax (called advertising) where all of the so called private capitalist support the private media with their advertising, there w/b no private corporate media and the Internet would be as it was supposed to be open to all) Inventions of infantile minds, often reach and hold harmony with a wondering mass of governed sheep, but real people know there is no such thing an an honest, non corrupt leader of a government, or a government that has a leader that does not punish those in its heard who fail to tow the national lines demanded by those in power. After all the purpose of government is to make a few rich.

Julian Assange is dying at the hands of the British, apparently after he was evicted from the Ecuador Embassy, he was admitted to the Novachok ward of a Prison Hospital, apparently near death? His crime a few deeds done by the leaders of the worlds biggest so called non-dictator democracies were exposed by his work.

I am particularly interested how you see socialism to have a good name? Socialism confused to be a system of a government, its meaning suggest a few at the top decided to call their system of government, a socialist system of government, but just like dictatorships its the few at the top that abuse and dictate to the governed masses. But when socialism is used as a system of economics, its its sought out by the non dictator democracies and destroyed as fast as possible as in Venezuela. <=Socialism like Capitalism is a system of economics, not a system of government.

People in the West like to fling the label "dictatorship" around quite a bit but when you look a little more closely the reality rarely fits the implication. I think the corporate mass media would have more difficulty getting away this if Americans got out more and traveled around, and not as members of armed gangs.

Trump having lied about draining the swamp, thinks he can distract our attention by pointing to other swaps ! Are we that stupid ? apparently the majority are ! But not those on MOA.
The US plan is not to drain the swamp but to curupt the entire world into being as bad as US. That’s the devils work.
Pointing at others and saying there worse than me/us is also very immature and juvenile! worthy of a 5year old. Guess what ? that’s a psychopathic symptom!
With Trump coming to U.K. I wonder if he’d care to vist Salisbury i’m told nearby ‘Portland Down ‘ do a nice line in perfume gifts, called novachok ! Thanks @snake for reminding me.

The Pentagon has just published the Indo-Pacific Strategy Report which comes down heavy on Russia, China and North Korea.
More on the DPRK "rogue state." (Be afraid, very afraid of DPRK.)

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) will remain a security challenge for DoD, the global system, our allies and partners, and competitors, until we achieve the final, fully verifiable denuclearization as committed to by Chairman Kim Jong Un. Although a pathway to peace is open for a diplomatic resolution of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, other weapons of mass destruction, missile threats, and the security challenges North Korea presents are real and demand continued vigilance. North Korea’s history as a serial proliferator, including conventional arms, nuclear technology, ballistic missiles, and chemical agents to countries, such as Iran and Syria, adds to our security concerns. Furthermore, the DPRK’s continued human rights violations and abuse against its own people, including violations of individuals’ freedom of expression, remain an issue of deep concern to the international community. The United States also continues to support Japan's position that North Korea must completely resolve the issue of Japanese abductees, and has raised this with North Korean authorities. .here

I must say that the insult produced by NK PR team about Biden lacks the flair of “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” that MSM repeated this time with relish, nattering nabobs of negativity that they are.

Concerning "the swamp", as I wrote several times, this deprecatory term precedes advances in ecology. Now we now that WETLAND are necessary for the health of the wider ecology, species diversity (e.g. Homo corruptibilis sub. Potomacian, Puella harlota sub. lobbista etc.). Draining swamps results in droughts, floods, lack of pollinating insects, wrong distribution of money that hates to be possessed by the undeserving poor etc.

North Koreans seem to have got crippled by translation in the second article. "Fool of low IQ" is pretty good as they seem to have a category for "fool of high IQs", too. I guess the B-team works on politicians that are not in power yet or may never be.

The tendency is to restore swamps for ecological reasons but Trump has been pretty old school for quite a while.

Yes, governments and economics are very intertwined. Some would call the US capitalism and others would call it socialism for the elite.
----------------------------

Grieved @ 120

I think Bill Mitchell would essentially agree with you

The book 'Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World' by Bill Mitchell and Thomas Fazi is divided into 2 parts.

Part 1 The Great Transformation Redux: From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism - and Beyond

Part 2 A Progressive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.

Chapter 5 in Part 1 is 'The State Never Went Away: Neoliberalism as a State-Driven Project'

He discusses how governments have aided and abetted neoliberal globalization such as

""the liberalisation of goods and capital markets; the privatisation of resources and social services; the deregulation of business, and the financial markets in particular; the reduction of workers' rights (first and foremost, the right to collective bargaining), and more generally the repression of labor activism; the lowering of taxes on wealth and capital, at the expense of the middle and working classes; the slashing of social programmes, and so on""

and

""Austerity policies are part of a one-sided class war being waged by the wealthy against the elderly, poor, and middle class""

Foggy Bottom: A nickname for the United States Department of State, whose offices were built in a formerly swampy area of Washington, D.C., known as Foggy Bottom because of vapors rising from the swamp.

Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated, as attributed to Mark Twain. Given his worldly education, KJU should be au fait with the works of the American humorist. Prolly gets a kick out of it with whoever he is supposed to have fed to dogs and crocodiles.Fabrications by West media has a long and inglorious history, dating back at least to British hack Edmund Back house and lurid tales of wild sex in the Forbidden City with the empress dowager.
Fast forward a century, and all the news that is fit to print remains same, lol!

South Korean Daily Says That Kim Jong-un Executed and Purged Top Nuclear Negotiators

Kim Hyok-chol (jointly with the North Korean Government?) should sue the New York Times for defamation in the US courts. That would fulfil numerous objectives, including: punish the NY Times for fabrication, provide a deterrance for fake news, prove that Kim Hyok-Chol is alive, uphold the reputation of the North Korean government and counter the negative propaganda, and provide an effective way to demonstrate to NYT readership how their paper fabricates stories. As restitution they can force the NYT to devote 100% of the front page every day for 1 week to a retraction of the claims, plus huge punitive damages.

2. "Washington was built on a riverbank. According to a National Park Service Ranger , the capital city is in a coastal floodplain, so it can be affected by tides, which occasionally make the ground soft and moist." [Mosquitosquad.com"] The point is that the waterways on the riverbank are TIDAL, not naturally doomed to be putrid. Fetid waters require the cooperation of puella harlotas with lobistas to produce rot.

3. This evening, I'm making a totally nominal contribution to b for June 1st post on blog housekeeping. Harboring high hopes for the new "Search" function.

Yes. I'm sure North Korea under KJU is a bastion of liberty, peace, and tranquility. I hear it's beautiful in the spring. When are you all planning on touring the shining jewel of Asia??
There now....let that hate flow through you...
:)

“Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.”
— Tommy Douglas

China achieved economic democracy and lifted 800 million of its citizens out of poverty. That is the elephant in the room that is ignored in the west. How did they do it? Can we achieve the same results? All we here is propaganda belittling their achievements. Meanwhile the freedom to go hungry in the US is met with crickets. Except for the bankers. They have ways of looking after themselves. For now.

@68 snake and 69 William Gruff, and others - "Socialism like Capitalism is a system of economics, not a system of government."

I am no expert on socialist theory, but Ramin Mazaheri, who definitely is a socialist, in his latest writings about China and its Cultural Revolution, continually points to the "two pillars of socialism".

One pillar is the redistribution of wealth, income and the means of production - i.e. out of the hands of oligarchs and into the keeping of the people, in whatever way this is devised.

The second pillar is the redistribution of power, into a true democracy that rules from the bottom up rather than the top down - and, I think, with a controlling cap at the top so that policy is ultimately coherent.

The second pillar is what often gets left out of socialist revolutions. To create it in China, a second revolution was required - mandated from the top, but executed by inverting real power and thrusting it directly to the bottom, so that it would trickle up. Mazaheri has illustrated how Iran is the only other nation to have instituted such a second, cultural revolution, with the same intentions and the same results.

So, if all this is true - and I see nothing untrue in any of the narrative - then socialism is far more than simply an economic system. It is in the end a democratic system of participatory national governance, far better than the form of "representative governance through the one-off vote" that we in the west have long suffered through.

~~

ps. it was off-topic but seemed very important, since the discussion had already begun

The disorder in HMG is so overwhelming that journalists write what they damn please. Caution about the reports of executions merely because previously the reportedly executed person were seen alive? What next -- doubting Novichok? compassion for Assange?

SEOUL, June 3 (Yonhap) -- A top aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched an art troupe's performance together with the leader, Pyongyang's state media reported Monday, belying rumors that he was purged for the leader's embarrassing no-deal summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Kim Yong-chol, who served as Pyongyang's chief interlocutor and counterpart of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, attended Sunday's performance by amateur art groups made up of the wives of military officers, together with leader Kim and other top officials, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

The report came after rumors of a purge spiked following a news report that leader Kim had carried out a massive punishment of officials responsible for the no-deal summit and that Kim Yong-chol was given hard labor and another negotiator was executed.

It's just so infuriating that "trusted" mainstream news sites report unverified rumors like this story as if it were true and when they are proven wrong we're somehow suppose to forget this whole event happened. What would people say about CNN's trustworthiness if they reported that Trump had the US Ambassador to Russia executed on Friday over the failed Warsaw conference and then he comes into work on Monday as normal, yet this is exactly how the mainstream media is behaving and they still demand to be treated with trust and respect - The only thing Trump has been 100% right since he started is called the mainstream news Fake News

It seems to be done to North Koreans exclusively, so there is probably a reason for it - like no real news coming out of the North Korean regime.

There is much more information on what is going on in the Chinese Communist party, so when someone is arrested and executed there you get the facts.

Trump's attack on "fake news" is an attempt to control the narrative himself by presenting "alternative" facts. This attack hits a media whose business model does not work anymore, so journalism is underfunded and anybody paying for news gets the type of news they want (or gets a click).
People are being played one way or the other.

The person photographed at the concert is Kim Yong Chol, who had been reported as purged and imprisoned/sent for re-education. The person reported as having been executed, Kim Hyok Chol, has still not been seen.